On Tuesday, 18 August, the Kumu Art Museum launches Flo Kasearu’s exhibition State of Emergency on the 5th floor. The artist examines the changes in the museum’s operations during the state of emergency caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Kasearu, who is known for her socio-critical work, continues her dissection of socially sensitive topics.
On Wednesday, 19 August, starting at 4 pm, the Kumu Art Museum will hold a discussion of the new exhibition Flo Kasearu: State of Emergency with the artist Flo Kasearu and the curator of the exhibition, Kati Ilves. The moderator will be the art critic Kaarin Kivirähk from the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Estonia. The talk will cover the background of the Kumu project, Kasearu’s creative principles, and the general impact of the pandemic on art circles.
In her unique project, the artist looks at how the working day and general daily life of the Kumu museum attendants changed during the COVID-19 crisis this past spring. The focus of the project is on the museum as an independent ecosystem, and the artist has recorded the changed daily routines of the most visible museum employees: the invigilators. State of Emergency consists of a single large-scale video installation, portraying eight museum attendants in novel situations.
The coronavirus pandemic, which took the world by storm in the spring of 2020, changed our current way of life all over the globe: in addition to extensive restrictions on people’s movements, almost all public buildings had to be closed. The contemporary art gallery of Kumu was also forced to stop all planned exhibition activities; the museum’s inaccessibility to the public made the museum employees think of alternative practices and come up with new ideas. The Kumu Art Museum partnered with the artist Flo Kasearu, who is known for her sensitive and incisive work with people and institutions, to record the impact of the state of the emergency on the museum.
“It required unusually quick action on the part of both the artist and the museum to capture the emergency situation in a work of art,” says the curator Kati Ilves. The resulting introspective video project is one of the first recordings of the new, turbulent time in the art world.
